On 03/08/2012 12:46 AM, Jonathan Morgan wrote:
Hi Michael,
On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 5:14 PM,
Kahunapule Michael Johnson <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 03/07/2012 04:53 PM,
Jonathan Morgan wrote:
... I'm suggesting copyright is the wrong tool to
use to enforce such claims, since I can't see that it
will actually target the one responsible for the
wrong. I agree quality control is a great thing to
have. I disagree that wide-ranging and not readily
enforceable copyright claims will achieve it.
You are free to disagree about copyright being useful to
ensure non-corruption of the text, but the copyright owners
are also free to disregard your objection and act contrary
to your wishes, anyway. I'm not the copyright owner. I'm one
of the world's greatest advocates of copyright-free Bibles
and senior editor of the World English Bible. I'm also in
the position of asking for copyright permission and dealing
with copyright owners' concerns. The #1 reason they give me
for copyrighting Bibles is that they want some way to
protect the text from corruption. Arguments to the contrary
are futile. You will be assimilated. OK, maybe not
assimilated, but ignored or disagreed with. At least that is
what kind of a response I usually get. I'm just trying to
preserve the fragile permissions I have gotten.
Thanks, I was unclear. I was not arguing against copyright in
Bibles generally (though I do not like it, it's a separate
issue). All I was arguing was that the provisions as you
described them to me seemed too wide-ranging, and as a result
were unenforceable.
I'm not arguing that you shouldn't do due diligence: given the
copyright terms it seems reasonable to do the best due
diligence possible. All I'm suggesting is that the bar of
"all known frontends showing the right thing" feels too high
to me. I hope that's a bit clearer.
Perhaps I should have said "all front ends that support that module
display the text without corruption" and "modules known not to
display a module correctly don't show it." That is the target we aim
for. I know that we may miss, given the nature of software
development, but we keep trying. I also know that you can't prevent
a determined and knowledgeable user from overriding any conditional
availability of modules we might set up, but we can make it easier
to use a front end within the bounds of its design limits than not
to.
Does that make sense?
Basically, I think we are in agreement about doing the best we can
with the tools we have and the fact that even good, experienced
programmers might mess up a line of code or even an algorithm design
from time to time. That is why we test...
Regardless of your feelings about copyrights and Bibles, we
have a higher reason to not want to corrupt or mis-display
Bible texts, anyway, so the copyright argument is secondary,
anyway.
I agree. However, where (I think) I would differ is in
questioning whether a frontend needs to handle perfectly every
module. It is most definitely a desirable goal, but so long
as there is a reasonable subset of modules that do work
perfectly and are used by people, the software is useful.
Sometimes due to earlier technical decisions it is impossible
without substantial work (e.g. RtoL, av11n), and that work
will take time to do. Such large projects will not
necessarily get the highest priority.
That is fine. My concern is that if I create a module that requires
certain features to display correctly, perhaps because of its
writing system, versification, or some other consideration, that
under normal conditions, it would only be offered to front ends that
support the required features. I'm looking for some reassurance,
here. Some things I have read on this list kind of scare me.
I don't think our quality standards in an open source project should
be any lower than in a proprietary project. Indeed, they should be
higher to help overcome the false impressions some people have of
open source projects. In this case, I think that we are well within
reasonableness to ask God for His help in going beyond what is
normally humanly possible with respect to quality.
|
